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The very title of Edward V. Bonner’s first volume of poetry, One Kiss (Ingram, 2015), suggests some ways in which the poems inside balance the universal with the particular. Most of the poems examine the themes of beauty and risk, pleasure and danger, in the context of one of three kinds of relationships: to romantic partners, to the spiritual world, and to the world of nature. But while these concerns are shared by much of humanity, Bonner’s poems sound consistently personal. In a few cases- A City Boy,
Cedar Lane, and Panther Creek -this effect is due partly to Bonner’s tributes to the Pittsburgh area, where he grew up. But far more often, this effect arises from his use of specific, powerful images as well as rhyme and repetition. These features of his verse enhance the exposition, and sometimes the resolution, of the tensions experienced by the poems’ speakers. The imagery in One Kiss ranges from the earthly to the ethereal. Highly specific, often bodily details characterize the poems’ descriptions of the passionate pleasures and uncertainties of love. In Crazy for Your Love, for example, the speaker asks his beloved, Do you want to smell my skin / The scent from the heat of my body when I am caressing you?. And I Adore You describes an imagined second date, complete with [p]alms sweaty, legs like rubber (20), as the speaker accompanies his beloved to her door. But while many of the poems are firmly grounded in the world of physical experience, some take more imaginative flights as well. For example, Sea of Dreams, rich with metaphor in its account of the speaker’s sea-change from a human into a merman, instantiates a dreamier, more fanciful tendency: Goddess of the ocean / My human heart is strong / I will follow your love song (13-15).Likewise, the speaker in Summer by the Sea tells his beloved, Your mystery is beautiful and innocent / Like a butterfly; delicate as it pollinates the flowers of this world (4-5).In his poems about love, Bonner uses imagery powerfully to convey the possibilities of disappointment and pleasure, risk and fulfillment.
